Use case
Pass the credential without opening a Slack channel
Some team conversations involve two people, last five minutes and should not exist afterwards. FadeChats gives them a room that needs no account, no install and no admin, and keeps nothing once you leave.
Open a private room
Open a private roomThe channel outlives the reason you made it
A teammate needs the staging database password in the next five minutes. The fast options all leave something behind: a DM that sits in workspace history and the next compliance export, a private channel someone has to create, name and later remember to archive, or an email that syncs to three devices. Two years later, a search for "password" still finds it.
Most of these handoffs involve exactly two people. FadeChats is built for that shape: one person opens a room, sends a one-time link, and the two browsers talk to each other directly. Nothing is provisioned, nobody needs an account, and after ten idle minutes the room expires with no copy on any server.
Pick the channel by what it leaves behind
| Setup | Who else can read it later | What remains afterwards | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Slack or Teams DM | None, if both are in the workspace | Admins and compliance exports, depending on plan | Searchable history until retention deletes it |
| New private channel | Create, invite, archive later | Same as a DM, plus anyone added later | Channel history and a name in the sidebar |
| Password manager share | Both on the same manager | Vault members | An encrypted, audited entry: the right home for a secret that gets reused |
| FadeChats | Open a page, send one link | Nobody: the link admits one person, once | Nothing on any server once the room expires |
Slack and Teams retention and export depend on your plan and your admin's settings.
Four moments where it fits
- Handing over a credential once
An API key for a contractor's first deploy, the router admin password for someone onsite. Send it, wait for "saved it in my vault", close the tab. One catch: FadeChats blocks copying text out of the chat, so the recipient types what they see. Fine for a passphrase, painful for a 64-character token; for those, use your password manager's share feature.
- The first minutes of an incident when the workspace is suspect
If a token leaked or a Slack account looks taken over, Slack is the last place to discuss it. Send the invite link by phone or SMS, not through the channel you distrust. If someone else redeems the link first, your colleague cannot get in, and you find out immediately.
- Someone outside the workspace
A vendor's engineer, a freelancer, a new hire whose account is not provisioned yet. Nobody gets invited to anything or installs an app: it runs in any current browser on a laptop or a phone.
- Behind a corporate firewall
Office networks often block direct browser-to-browser connections. When that happens, the connection falls back to a relay server that forwards encrypted packets it cannot read and does not keep. The conversation still never lands in storage.
Where it stops being the right tool
A FadeChats room holds two people, not a team. A real incident with five responders needs a proper channel or bridge, with the secrets kept out of it. If your company must keep records of security decisions, a chat that keeps nothing conflicts with that policy, so check before using it for anything that belongs on the record. It cannot stop a screenshot, and it is not a vault: once the room ends, the only copy of that password is wherever the recipient saved it.
Frequently asked questions
Is it safe to share passwords over Slack?
Slack encrypts messages in transit and at rest, but it keeps them: in history, in search, and in exports that admins can run depending on your plan. A password sent in a DM is a password stored in Slack until retention deletes it. Rotate anything already shared that way.
Can I add a third person to the room?
No. A FadeChats room holds exactly two people and the invite link works once. For three or more, use your team's chat or an incident bridge, and hand the secrets themselves over one-to-one.
Does IT need to install or approve anything?
There is nothing to install: it runs in the browser on any current desktop or phone. Whether you may use outside tools for work data is your company's policy rather than a technical question, so check it first.
What does the FadeChats server see?
Only the signals two browsers need to find each other, plus a hashed invite token while the room exists. Text and images travel over the encrypted peer-to-peer channel and are never sent to or stored by the server.